Does He Ever Update His Page?

Jan 5, 2001

Here's the big update I've been promising. First, I realized I never
told anyone about my new system. Here's what I've got: Duron 700,
GeForce 2 MX TwinView, 128 megs of RAM, a 45 gig UDMA66 Western Digital
hard drive, a Hauppage WinTV Go, a SoundBlaster 128 PCI, and an
Intellimouse Explorer (that's right, the
best mouse in the world).
Caveats: The NVidia Linux driver does not currently support the
TwinView feature, although I did pop my cursed S3 ViRGE in and give
multihead a try. You can check out the screenshot
here.
Also, I'm still having a bit of problems with the WinTV card under
the 2.2.x kernel. 2.4.0 was just released yesterday, but I have to wait
for 2 things: the International
Kernel Patch (so I can access my 500 meg encrypted partition), and
support for the NVidia kernel module. I've read that
[Bb]o[wr]is.* ported the
driver to 2.3.x, but I haven't actually heard anything from NVidia or
talked to him about it, so I'm going to wait and see. Until then,
the WinTV is off-limits unless I feel like either rebooting afterwards
or risking the "magical disappearing filesystem game of fun" (I already
lost several great Bjork MP3s). On the positive side, I was getting
hard locks until I manually upgraded the i2c and bttv kernel modules;
now I just get wierdness that requires a reboot.

As for the page, I've been making changes here and there. The most
notable change is probably the sidebar; I decided it didn't really
fit with the look for the rest of the page, so I added a bumpmapped
effect to it's image as well. Let me know what you think. The
astute readers will note the addition of a CVS link on the sidebar;
yes, I've got a CVS server with some stuff I'm working on, and no,
it's not ready for public consumption just yet. I'll let y'all know
when it's ready.

Software, software. I've been trying out tons of new stuff since I
got this new machine. First of all,
AVI File is one of the best
media players I've seen in a while. It plays (suprise!) AVI files,
including -- everyone's favorite --
DivXs. I grabbed all my roommate's
DivX's, and I've been watching them while I wait for 2.4.x so I can
use my WinTV again. The other thing I've been using a lot is
GKrellM.
Richlowe tried to get
me to install it a few months back, but I never bothered listenign to
him. Well, I wish I had. GKrellM has replaced all my epplets, and
it uses less CPU time, less desktop space, and actually does a lot
more (line in volume control, mousewheel support, better theming,
etc etc). I don't have it in a screenshot yet, but I'll take one soon
so you can see my new and improved desktop. Finally, I've been
playing around with
VNC a bit. It's
sort of like
screen,
but for X. Basically, you launch VNC, start some X applications,
then you can reconnect from other machines, even MacOS and Windows
machines. Or a web browser! The protocol isn't encrypted, but it's
cake to set up SSH port forwarding
(ssh -C -L localport:remotehost:remoteport remotehost, then start the
VNC viewer). Finally, i started using
LogColorise
for my logs. You can see it in any of my
latest screenshots.